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Agent Runtime: Standing Goals

"Keep working until the release checklist is complete" is a different shape from everything else openwop models. RFC 0052/0058/0060 fire a run on a clock or predicate; RFC 0068 fires a run when an inferred commitment's condition is met. All are arms…

Status: Draft · v1.x (RFC 0097). Normative spec for the standing-goal primitive — a durable objective with judge-based completion and bounded continuation. Capability-gated on capabilities.agents.goals. Keywords MUST, SHOULD, MAY follow RFC 2119. See auth.md for the status legend. This doc graduates Draft → Stable when RFC 0097 reaches Accepted.

Why this exists

"Keep working until the release checklist is complete" is a different shape from everything else openwop models. RFC 0052/0058/0060 fire a run on a clock or predicate; RFC 0068 fires a run when an inferred commitment's condition is met. All are arms that trigger work. None models a standing objective that judges its own completion and re-engages until satisfied. The distinction is convergence, not triggering: a goal owns (1) a success predicate, (2) a judge that evaluates progress after each contributing run, and (3) a continuation decision.

openwop already has the parts — the judge (RFC 0090 verifier & convergence), the continuation arm (RFC 0052/0060/0068), and the safety rails (RFC 0058 execution bounds, RFC 0044 escalation, RFC 0084 budget). This section pins the objective object that ties a success criterion to a judge to a continuation loop, plus the hard invariant that continuation MUST terminate at a declared bound or an unmet escalation. The judge model and the planning stay host choices.

The Goal object

A Goal (schemas/goal.schema.json) carries an objective (SR-1 redaction-safe), a state (active | satisfied | escalated | abandoned | bound-exceeded), a completion block (the judge — an RFC 0090 verifier verdict or an opaque host evaluator, with the recorded lastVerdict), a continuation block (mode ∈ {schedule, commitment, heartbeat, manual} + an armRef), an RFC 0058 bounds block, optional progress, and an owner (RFC 0048).

Hosts advertise the supported judge, the continuation modes, and requiresBounds under capabilities.agents.goals.

Normative requirements

1. Judge-only completion. A goal's completion MUST be determined by the judge declared in completion.check (an RFC 0090 verifier verdict or the host evaluator). A client MUST NOT be able to set state: satisfied directly. (SECURITY invariant goal-completion-judge-only.) 2. Bounded continuation. Continuation MUST be bounded: when requiresBounds is advertised, an active goal without RFC 0058 bounds is invalid (POST /goals ⇒ 422). The host MUST stop continuation and set state: bound-exceeded (emitting goal.closed) when any declared bound is crossed — iteration count, accumulated cost (RFC 0084), or wall-clock deadline. (SECURITY invariant goal-continuation-bounded.) 3. Escalation halt. If the agent cannot make progress and emits an RFC 0044 confidence-escalation interrupt against a goal, the host MUST set state: escalated and stop continuation until a human resolves it. 4. Attribution + replay. Each judge evaluation MUST be attributable to the runId it evaluated (goal.evaluated.runId); progress.contributingRunIds is RFC 0040 causation-compatible. The verdict (satisfied/confidence) is non-deterministic judge output and MUST be recorded in the goal.evaluated event and MUST NOT be recomputed on replay/fork (replay.md). 5. Redaction. objective and any verdict payload MUST be SR-1 redaction-safe.

Endpoints + events

The host serves the goal surface as a host-extension under /v1/host/sample/goals (GET list/read, POST create, PATCH edit, POST .../pause|resume|abandon — see host-sample-test-seams.md), promotable to the normative /v1/goals at graduation. There is no complete/satisfy write — completion is the judge's verdict, never a client assertion. Two additive, content-free events are emitted (gated on the capability): goal.evaluated (after each judge check) and goal.closed (run-event-payloads.schema.json).

Open spec gaps

GapDisposition
Normative /v1/goals endpoints in api/openapi.yamlDeferred to graduation (pre-authored near Active → Accepted, per the RFC 0086 precedent). Floor surface is the host-extension seam.
Judge model / planning strategyOut of scope by design — host choice. The protocol pins only the object, lifecycle, bound-enforcement, and events.
SDK methods (goals group)Tracked in openwop-sdks; not part of the spec-corpus floor.

References

  • schemas/goal.schema.json
  • capabilities.md §agents.goals
  • RFCS/0097-standing-goals-and-judge-based-continuation.md
  • RFCS/0090-agent-verifier-and-convergence.md (the judge)
  • RFCS/0058 execution bounds · RFCS/0044 confidence escalation · RFCS/0084 budget
  • conformance/src/scenarios/goal-standing-continuation.test.ts